I have been diligent about doing the daily tamers every day. Thats where I get the majority of my leveling experience. A nice bonus was the bandages and occasional stones from the bags. Unfortunately, the droprate for bandages has decreased significantly since Master Li began selling them for celestial coins. Now that I'm buying the burger buff with my weekly coin, I have two hours of double xp per week. Great, right? Well with the additional buff, I have now burned through my stockpile of bandages because I speed-level while buffed. So the problem is I can either use the burger but lose efficiency because I can't heal my teams when needed, or I can buy bandages which I do not need (unless I'm buffed for speed-leveling). Catch-22.

I would really like to see Blizzard add at least one other option for getting bandages or hike the droprate for the daily bags back up a bit. It makes very little sense to have to choose between the extra buff or the bandages once per week. If you aren't buffed, you hardly need the bandages. If you are buffed, you can't afford the bandages.

I haven't noticed any decrease in the drop rate of bandages lately. Not that I've been tracking them but I'm still getting far more than I use and still end up selling stacks to vendors because I seem to have more than I'd ever need. Are you doing trainers with the burger buff up or are you doing wild pet battles? If wild pet battles where are you battling and what is your team like? You might be able to reduce your need for bandages while still leveling quickly.

Kpb321 wrote:Are you doing trainers with the burger buff up or are you doing wild pet battles?

I'm double-buffing then doing the epic tamer dailies in Pandaria for 25 minutes, then I do field battles for the remainder of my buff. I've tried doing field battles near stablemasters (spawnrate seems to be permanently nerfed), rotating a few field teams (tedious without an add-on), using healers (speed efficiency loss). Several ways to reduce the use of bandages, yes. But most are kind of pointless when the buff is ticking. Arguably, you don't NEED bandages at all. But my point is why offer bandages in exchange for the same 1-per-week currency that you buy the buff? You use both items together, so it makes little sense to have to choose one or the other.

Ravnhawk wrote:I haven't noticed a nerf either. I do the panda bag trainers and the Fabled ones as well. I got 23 bandages.

Wow! Yeah, a stack is about what I used to get in 1-2 days. But I now get 2 bandages per day if I'm lucky. I also do the fables for the lesser xp buff, and yes they drop bandages, just not many. Obviously I'm using more bandages than I used to since I'm doing two hours of speed-leveling per week instead of one. But bandages just don't drop like they used to for me.

I'll add to the general comments that I haven't noticed a drop in bandages, either. Also, as a suggestion, you might try using a few of the strong healer+damage pets for your "grinding" teams. Use a Gahz'rooki or most of the regular raptors for Devour, plus things like the Molten Hatchling (using Leech Life, Cauterize, and Brittle Webbing). Played well you can generally use no to almost no bandages no matter how long you are fighting, as long as you have a few of the above mentioned pets. I use Gahz'rooki + a bear to level my pets from lvl 1 to about 7 (2 fights) then switch to a raptor + molten hatchling for the rest of the way. Mind you I tend to grind down near my farm, so it's LOTS of critters, so they die fast and my 25's tend to stay near max health as they kill off each one.

Have you tried by Nitum or Lucky Yi? There should be plenty of critters around and beasts with Devour should make quick work of them and stay healed pretty well. Other than I don't think it has changed and it is just a case of demand changing and finally outstripping supply.

how many alts do you have?if you have a lot you can place them at all the trainers you can.doing so is a nice way to level forgotten alts and you will get tons of bandages.bandages are now account bound so you can trade them to one central toon you do the power leveling with.I have an alt at all trainers now.also with realm mergers you can make alts on the realm you merged with and trade stuff back and forth with them now.

I have 400 bandages on bank alt 1, and this week I will be hitting 400 on bank alt 2. I also have a full stack on every alt on my main server.

Are we able to send bandages cross server yet? If I can I will send bandages to an alt on a server I never play, and he can hold them for me.

But I haven't noticed any difference yet in the drop-rate.

You may just be going through a dry spell. I went through a few weeks once where I didn't get any stones. But then all of the sudden BAM! I got three in one day, and one on the next day. RNG is a bugger that way. Once I saved up 30 Sacks of Helpful Supplies and opened them all at once, hoping for a big surprise... LOL! I will never do that again. Getting nothing out of 30 bags was far more disappointing than going a few weeks with no stones.

SUGGESTION: I recommend that you make a few leveling teams. If you let your health drop on one leveling pet, then switch teams for the next tamer, by the time you get finished with your third team, your "Revive Battle Pets" ability will be ready, and you won't need to use a single bandage. You will split the leveling up between three pets, but in the end it will take the same amount of time as it would take to level all three one at a time. This strategy is most likely why I have SO MANY BANDAGES!!!

Last edited by Abashera on December 18th, 2013, 10:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

Since others posted, I started doubting myself about the bandage droprate. But once again, I only got a few total yesterday out of 12 tamer bags. So either I'm on a long and ridiculously awful RNG streak, or the droprate has changed.

I'm taking your suggestions as advice. I'm switching up my speed-leveling strat a bit to use fewer bandages, since my coin will be spent on the burger buff until all my pets are 25.

It seems weird to spend an hour (or two) to level pets faster for an hour. That being said, I'll still probably go back to farming the Celestial Tournament for burgers, now that I've finished getting the four pets. It's a bit stressful, but I like it better than PvP pet battles.

I have so many bandages that I was about to start selling them to vendors... then they added cross-realm mailing, so I have started sending them to alts that are not on my primary realm.

Cool thing... I discovered that I can invite alts on other realms to group using the same format as mailing to them (i.e. <Character Name>-<Realm Name>) so I have started inviting characters on alt realms to group with my level 90s on my primary realm and hauling them to tamers in Pandaria. A new advantage to having two accounts. I had already set up my alts at the tamers outside of Pandaria before I learned that I could do this.

I am guessing that it just seems like you are getting fewer bandages because you are using more of them.

Maizing wrote:Cool thing... I discovered that I can invite alts on other realms to group using the same format as mailing to them (i.e. <Character Name>-<Realm Name>) so I have started inviting characters on alt realms to group with my level 90s on my primary realm and hauling them to tamers in Pandaria. A new advantage to having two accounts. I had already set up my alts at the tamers outside of Pandaria before I learned that I could do this.

I've just gotta try this when I get home. Too awesome! I was waiting for a Realm merge to look into dropping my 3rd account, but this may do it almost as well. Thanks!

Silverthorn wrote:It seems weird to spend an hour (or two) to level pets faster for an hour. That being said, I'll still probably go back to farming the Celestial Tournament for burgers, now that I've finished getting the four pets. It's a bit stressful, but I like it better than PvP pet battles.

I did feel this way too but I tried it and found it really useful all the same. You can get a pet from 1 to 24 in three trainer battles with the twin buffs and hat. It woulds out that they'll go from 1 to 15-ish in the first, 15-ish to 21 in the second, and 21 to 24 in the third. If nothing else, it's been a nice boon for all the pandarian pets, as they tend to be level 21-ish when you capture them and stone them, so you can technically get around 11 pets of the pandarian pets to level 24 in an hour or so.